Introduction
This week was a bit of a struggle, creativity-wise. I was feeling pretty burnt-out from drawing from reference and I still have a lot of mental blockage when it comes to drawing from imagination. So, rather than trying to find interesting poses or portrait photos to recreate, I decided to spend some time honing fundamentals.
One of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling stuck on my art journey is to take to YouTube to watch and appreciate the processes of those with far more experience than I. This week I was looking for methods of brushing up on form and construction when I came across a couple of videos from artist brokendraw.
He has a video titled "the only art tutorial you will ever need" (yes, the title is a little aggrandizing; it's sort of a requirement for YouTube uploads in the engagement economy). It's chock-full of pretty solid drawing exercises categorized by how useful they would be based on how long you've been drawing. I decided to give a few of these a try each day just to force myself to get some drawing done.
However, I quickly grew bored of adhering to the exercises and began doodling instead. I don't consider that a problem! Doodling is drawing, and any drawing counts as practice.
Some more practice resources
While I was looking for ways to practice form, I came across a very useful little site called Practice Drawing This. It has a ton of tools made to help artists with references for all kinds of shapes and forms.
Their 3D model viewer has a multitude of configurations and generation options for different skills that are very useful for any draftsperson to practice. In particular, the Varying Deformed Organic Forms generator was in the sweet spot of challenging enough to force me to learn, but not so challenging to make me give up immediately.
Returning to figures
As the week progressed, the pull to draw figures became insurmountable. I found a couple of references on Pinterest and got to work.
I was still pretty tired and mostly just pushing myself to draw at this point, so I gave up a little sooner than I might have usually. But the taste was enough to get me sketching more figures.
The joy of painting
One thing I wanted to practice this week was a bit of digital painting. I'm not at all confident when it comes to painting as compared to sketching, but landscapes are an artistic goal of mine. So I gave it a shot.
I didn't spend a lot of time on this one as I got pretty disheartened when it didn't come together the way I wanted initially. Maybe I'll revisit it at some point in the future. I think I need to study some other artists' landscape processes.
I gave painting another try with something a little more comfortable for me -- still life. I found a nice reference photo of an onion and got to work.
Yes, I gave it little Shrek ears to make it mine. My wife thought it was a pomegranate, which I can excuse. It was harder than I thought to make the blended shades read as the layers of an onion.
Conclusion
Although I don't have a lot of digital work to show off this week, I was still exercising some artistic muscle. Keen-eyed, returning readers will note the various aesthetic improvements I've made to the blog as a whole. I leaned heavily into the newspaper theming and tried to make the design language more cohesive with sharper borders and drop shadows.
Additionally, I spent a good amount of lunchtime at work doing some pencil sketching in my notebooks. They're not clean enough to display here, sadly, but I'm glad to be experimenting with physical media once more. Mechanical pencil is a joy to doodle with.
I'm still going strong on this artistic journey. I'm no expert at learning, but I'm figuring out what works for me, and enjoying the process all the while. I hope these posts are as useful to you as they are to me.
Have a vivrant week!
